How IKEA's Helping Shelter Dogs Find Homes

Now you can get a reasonably-priced couch and adopt a shelter dog all in one spot.

IKEA and other home-furnishing stores have partnered with animal lovers to launch an innovative way to find homeless pets a family. Home for Hope is an adoption project featuring life-size cutouts of the furry fellas in store showrooms, so shoppers can see how much sweeter their living room would be with Kiwi sitting by the couch.

This is Kiwi.

Every cardboard cutout is an enlarged photo of the actual pet up for adoption. There are barcodes attached so shoppers can scan for more info on the dog's personality.

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IKEA is only featuring the project in Singapore and Tempe, Arizona at the moment, but more stores are likely to join the effort. Having partnered with the Arizona Humane Society, the Tempe store saved each of the six pets it has featured since bringing the project to the U.S. last month.

In other words, this strategy works. It just needs momentum. As Home for Hope reports, "most animal shelters can only afford to voice their messages using social media," a largely ineffective format for recruiting new animal lovers.